1950-1969

By 1954, it
was clear that the Court’s growing staff and caseload
had created space problems at 27 Madison Avenue.

In that year, a six-story addition to the courthouse
was begun at 31 Madison Avenue. Twelve years later the
original courthouse was declared a landmark; in 1981,
the courtroom itself was so designated.

In the post-war decades, New York grew in recognition
as an international center of culture. The American musical
theater was at its height: shows like the Music Man
and The Sound of Music were Broadway hits, along with
more serious fare such as Raisin in the Sun and A Streetcar
Named Desire. The Actor’s Studio and other schools
brought new acting talents to the city, such as Marlon
Brando, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. From time to
time a theater company or its star would find itself
resorting to the Court, as did the producers of My Fair
Lady when its theater threatened to evict the play.
New York was a center for both popular and classical
music, the latter celebrated with the 1964 opening of
the Lincoln Center Complex, itself a subject of litigation
before the Court.

In the 1950s the City also flourished as a center for
the television industry.

The new phenomenon of “quiz
shows” figured in court cases, when one attorney,
a contestant on “Twenty-One,” was suspended
from practice for perjuring herself in an investigation
into the rigging of these shows.

The Court over the years dealt with the effect of change
on the traditional, married, two-parent family. In 1944,
the Court modified the rule of nonliability of a putative
father to support his child. Two years later, it ruled
for the first time that an illegitimate child could
receive death benefits of its putative father under
the New York Employees’ Retirement System.

On the international front, the Cold War decades after
World War II led to major decisions by the Appellate
Division.

In 1950, an American-based group within the Russian
Orthodox Church invoked a schism, seeking control of
the Russian Orthodox St.Nicholas Cathedral and effective
control over governance of the church itself. Plaintiffs
argued that, under the thumb of the disapproving Soviet
Government, the Russian church authorities had lost
all independence. The Appellate Division ruled that
the dispute had to be dealt with according to church,
not secular, law.

At home, the
Cold War manifested itself in the drive to identify
and punish domestic communists. In the course of this
“Red Scare,” innocent people were sometimes
“blacklisted” and refused employment. One
of these, John Henry Faulk, a well-known radio and TV
performer before his blacklisting, sued an anti-communist
organization called “AWARE”, charging he
had lost employment and income as a result of its allegations.
Faulk won a large libel judgment in one of the most
publicized cases of 1963.

Among the changes emerging from the post-war period
was an energized civil rights movement for racial equality.
In one leading 1964 case, the Court held it proper that
a school district be designed deliberately to incorporate
minority students. Though New York had not had de jure
segregation during this time, the civil rights movement
greatly expanded access to opportunities for the City’s
racial and other minorities.

A decade earlier, in a case involving religious discrimination,
the Appellate Division had affirmed that a New York
employment agency’s questions to an applicant
about her religion and changes in family name were discriminatory.
The Court also took on religious discrimination in a
1960 case, which held that a Saudi Arabian oil company
hiring American workers could not carry out an anti-semitic
hiring policy in New York.

Sexual discrimination became a legal issue, too. In
1957, the Court held against the practice of keeping
sex-based eligibility lists for school principals and
junior principals of elementary schools, and four years
later it declared illegal the New York Police Department’s
refusal to allow women to take the sergeant’s
examination.

In 1963, the Appellate Division heard and decided
the case of Hill v. Joseph Hayes and Time, Inc.

This case concerned a magazine article about a fictionalized
play based on a 1952 incident in which a Pennsylvania
family was held hostage by escaped convicts. The article
dwelt on the original incident and mentioned the Hill
family by name. The Court’s decision holding that
the article constituted an invasion of privacy was affirmed
by the New York Court of Appeals but later reversed by the U.S.
Supreme Court, which thereby significantly expanded
the existing parameters of constitutionally protected
speech.

New York’s
harbor had made it a major shipping center since the
days of Peter Stuyvesant, and the Court’s caseload
reflected the continuing importance of New York harbor.
In the modern era, cases dealing with all aspects of
the shipping industry - from shipbuilding contracts
to questions of sea-worthiness to longshoremen’s
collective bargaining issues – have come to the
Court’s attention. The Appellate Division has
been called on to pass upon regulations issued by the
Waterfront Commission.

Another case, an invasion of privacy action, concerned
the publication of a popular book, Waterfront Priest.

During the 1950's and 1960's the Court dealt with matters
concerning the new Bronx River Expressway, and Lincoln
Tunnel, the George Washington Bridge, and a new Port
Authority. In one memorable case, the Court ordered
the builder of a residential high-rise, who had overbuilt
the structure in violation of the zoning law, to remove
several stories of the building.

As New York’s superstructure continued to grow
New Yorkers would give new thought to the preservation
of their past.